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Brian Chesky on why Airbnb took months to hire their first employee

Name: Brian Chesky on why Airbnb took months to hire their first employee
Uploaded: 2024-02-21T12:54:52+00:00
Duration: 39 s
Channel: Lorenzo
Description: Brian Chesky recounts hiring Airbnb’s first employee — their first engineer. He says the search took four or five months, involved reviewing thousands of…

21 Feb 2024 · 1 min

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Brian Chesky recounts hiring Airbnb’s first employee — their first engineer. He says the search took four or five months, involved reviewing thousands of candidates and interviewing hundreds, and that the decision mattered because the first engineer would set the company’s long-term DNA and hiring template for many future employees.

Questions this video answers

Their first engineer.

Four or five months.

He looked through thousands of people and interviewed hundreds.

Chapters

How long did it take you to hire a first employee? So our first employee was our first engineer, and I think we looked for him for four or five months. And I probably looked through thousands of people and interviewed hundreds of people. And some people ask, why did you spend so much time on hiring your first engineer? And here's what we thought about it. I felt like your first engineer was like bringing in DNA to your company. If we were successful, there were going to be a thousand people just like him or her in the company. And so it wasn't a matter of getting somebody to build the next three features that we needed to ship for our users. There was something much more long term and much more enduring, which was, do I want to work with 100 or 1,000 more people like this?